Reading up on the hate fest in Washington over the weekend

The Daily Beast, The New Yorker and The New York Times opine on the anger spilling over from the summer’s townhalls, manifested in this weekend’s Washington protests against the Obama administration.

The Beast‘s John Avlon says Republicans can benefit from an angry mob of “useful idiots,” but they won’t be able to control their rage, especially if they keep allowing talking heads such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to lead the conservative movement.

The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg examines the “lunatic paranoia” behind a conservative movement that calls President Obama a Nazi, a socialist, a communist, a fascist and a non-citizen. The movement is “touched with populism, nativism, racism and anti-intellectualism” and “has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment.

“What is different now,” he adds, is “the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart — also, Heaven help us, its brain — is a ‘conservative’ media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News.”

The Times‘ Paul Krugman says the angry American has a “Perotista cast. It burns hottest, obviously, on the Beck-watching, Limbaugh-listening right. But it’s disaffected independents, as much as doctrinaire conservatives, who have pushed Obama’s approval numbers steadily southward.”

“As long as the Republican Party is defined by its most juvenile ideologues (think Joe Wilson) and its most transparent panderers (think Michael Steele),” he says, “it’s hard to see the party capitalizing on this angry centrism the way the Gingrich revolutionaries did.”